Through the hell of the Red Forest: a liquidator remembers

Alexander Antonov was pressed into action in the Chernobyl clean-up. Unlike some of his comrades, he survived to tell the tale.

Alexander Antonov sits chain-smoking at
the kitchen table in a worn jacket and jeans. He’s had 25 years to reflect on
his experience, but the retired journalist still struggles to find the words.

“After Chernobyl, I know what it must
have been like in a war,” he finally begins.

In his youth, Mr Antonov had been
stationed as a Red Army soldier for almost three years in East Germany. Little
did he expect to be conscripted again – at the age of 40.

Immediately after the Chernobyl reactor
explosion on 26 April 1986, young recruits were sent to the disaster zone to
begin crude clean-up efforts. Mr Antonov heard from people who were there how
that went. In one instance, teenage soldiers were sent up to the roof of the
undamaged reactor where the radiation was strongest. “They ran up like they
were possessed, picked up say a chair leg with a shovel, threw it off the top
and then ran back down, allin
about 40 seconds,” he says.Ample time to receive a lethal dose of radiation.

“As it became clear that they were all
doomed to die, they called in 40-year-old reservists. Their logic was something
to the effect that they already had children and had nothing else to live for.”

And the journalist was one of them. One
evening in January 1987, two military personnel came to his door, checked his
passport and ordered him to appear at armed forces headquarters the next
morning. Mr Antonov knew immediately what this meant and that there was no
avoiding it. A few days later, he was riding in a truck through the “Red
Forest” – woodland near the power plant thathad been exposed to suchhigh levels of radiation that the trees turned red and died.
“The villages were all deserted, and the birds’ nests were empty,” he recalls.

Spared by chance

The soldiers lived in a tent in the
30-kilometre exclusion zone around the reactor. Although Mr Antonov was there
as a truckdriver, to bring
soldiers to the area daily, those in charge decided they needed someone who
could use a typewriter to type up reports – and he was chosen. “That probably
saved my life,” he says.

Mr Antonov was there for 50 days and
drove three times to the reactor, taking him past cooling ponds that had frozen
over: “I could not believe my eyes when I saw an ice fisherman out there.”

The majority of the soldiers did not
wear protective masks, even though many of the objects lying around were
heavily contaminated. Mr Antonov was not as exposed to the radiation as many
others ,thanks to his typing duty. But to this day his skin reddens severely
when exposed to the sun, the result of his time as a so-called “liquidator”,
doctors tell him.

One scene in particular remains seared
into his memory: the sight of a young soldier from Turkmenistan who sat beside
him in a hospital in Kiev: “He looked ghastly, his eyeballs were literally
hanging out of their sockets.”

The soldier, who was also a truck
driver, had got out to change a tyre that blew in the middle of the Red Forest – where they were under strict instructions never to stop. “Many died there,”
Mr Antonov says quietly, lighting another cigarette.

Badge and a fruit basket

The only way they could cope with the
horrors of the work was, he says, with vodka. People have generally avoided the
subject of Chernobyl and what he went through. Not even his fellow journalists
at Pravda would speak to him about it, perhaps afraid of what they’d hear, he
says.

For his services as a liquidator, Mr
Antonov received a monetary bonus that allowed him buy a car, a rare privilege
in Soviet times. But he ditched it
after the 1991 Soviet collapse because it was a reminder of something he wanted
to forget.

In 2006, on the 20th anniversary of the
disaster, the Soviet Union caught up with him one last time: “The state
presented me with a liquidator badge, a basket of fruit and vegetables,
biscuits and chocolate – just like in the ‘good old days’.”